Making a product

With so many online stores to choose from, it can be difficult to make sure that your music reaches as many people as possible. To make matters easier, a number of distribution companies offer aggregation services, which simplify the process of getting your tracks into online stores.

One that you can use at home in your own time is Rebeat, a German service based around proprietary software which guides you through the upload process step-by-step. Rebeat will distribute your tracks to a huge number of online stores, including iTunes, Beatport, eMusic, Musicload, Napster and countless others around the world. The software does costs €99 but that price includes free lifetime updates so it could pay for itself quickly if you have a hit - especially if you’re using it to run your own label.

Here’s how it works:

Step 1: Rebeat contains four pages: Product Data, Audio Import, Track Data and Promotion. The Product Data page is where you enter the main information about the album or single you’re trying to sell and the numerous tracks it contains. At this point Rebeat guides you through the process of uploading artwork, entering a title, artist name and all the details. It costs one Euro to upload a track but each track also requires an ISRC which also costs one Euro. Each product must also have an EAN (barcode number), which will set you back another five Euro but the same EAN can then be used for physical releases.